This is a beta for the most technical users. If you cannot follow the instructions below without help, you should not be attempting the process.

About
Samba for iPhone/iPod Touch allows you to see your device as a network drive on your computer (and you can copy / change / stream files from / to it). It works on any OS that supports SMB/CIFS protocols (out of the box for most ones, including Windows). Basically it should work / interact just like another computer in your network with regards to file sharing.

This package should work on both 2.x and 3.x OS versions.

Disclaimer
This is a BETA release, install it at your own risk, only if you feel comfortable with accessing the device via terminal. The final release will be made publicly on Cydia with a much simpler installation routine.
If you install it, please provide me back with feedback about this package as much as possible, including on what device & OS and if it works Ok or not, and general thoughts about the configuration.

Please report your findings to openhebrew (at) gmail (dot) com with Samba in the topic or leave a comment here.

How to use this
Samba is disabled after installation, to turn it on and configure it:
1. Go to Settings in your device.
2. Go to Samba.
3. Change the settings as you like.
4. To start samba, make sure to turn autostart on, and leave the settings pane.

Important Notes
- The service is turned off by default after installation.
- The service username is root and cannot be changed.
- The service default password is listed on the bottom on the settings pane (this is a security feature, each device has it’s own auto generated passwd), you can use it, or change to your own one.
- nmbd isn’t automatically loaded, so device doesn’t show up at “network neighbourhood” (and the likes) for now.
- The whole filesystem of the device shows up as a writable network share with the URI \\<your phone ip>\main in windows or smb://<your phone ip>/main otherwise.
- To make samba work also when screen is black (device is idle), consider installing insomnia and running it: apt-get install com.imalc.insomnia (and respring), this makes network applications still keep running when device goes idle, and is not specific to samba.

This is great but I ran into one bug that seems rather strange and I couldn’t figure out how to solve it, if anyone here knows the solution to this..I’ll be more than happy to hear:

I can’t access paths such as the Calendar (/var/mobile/Library/Calendar) or the AddressBook folder, they show up to be blocked or something as such.
But..Using a Finder (the default OSX file browser, such as explorer.exe on Windows) replacement called PathFinder I was able to access these folders.

Really good job. Nice app with no glitches that I have seen. Things that would make it better are either a sbsettings toggle or an icon to not have to go into the settings pane to turn it on or off…insomnia a good example to follow for the icon

things to note:
1- no icon shown for Samba in the settings
2- AutoStart Samba option is automatically turned off when going back to settings screen
3- when going back to HomeScreen the iphone is still accessible from the PC ^_^

other than that its working perfectly when coping files from and to the iphone

I went into Settings.app -> Samba preferences pane -> Turned on “AutoStart Samba” switch -> Quited Settings.app (using a normal Home button click).
After that Samba was working but later on when I:
Went into Settings.app -> Samba preferences pane
I fount out that the “AutoStart Samba” switch was turned off.

What would be wonderful, though, is if you could write an article outlining some of the steps you used to get this to compile. I’ve just started playing around with the toolchain on my phone and while I’ve been able to work around some issues, others leave me vexed. For example, I eventually got cron to work, but Samba was giving me issues that you obviously worked around.

There are some half-assed tutorials out there that give the basics of getting started with the tools, but it’s obvious from the above that you could probably write what could become the standard to follow. Please consider it.

Do you have the problem I mentioned above? That you have some block icon on folders such as: /var/mobile/Library/AddressBook
through Path Finder I ca access these folders (even though they have this icon thing) but not through the Finder itself, there I get stuck at /var/mobile/Library and can’t access the contents of the AddressBook folder.

It’s working fine for me. I’m on OS Windows Vista Home Premium iPhone FW2.2.1. I Samba installed very smooth I have no “auto-restart” bug and I can acces all folders just fine. Playing with it a little more right now.

Can I use this share connection in iTunes like Firefly, since firfly is crashing on my device, and can’t get it to work anymore.

And an idea for the developer:
would it be great to make an option “media center” wich will generate a html from which you can access all your photo’s, video’s and music.
with option to add custom folders.

Wow, in Vista Explorer, the navigating thru the folders are very quick. And this is the first time I have a way to searching my system folders on my iphone. Amazing how quick this all is working. Does wonder me why iPhonebrowser and diskaid are so slow and have no search functions.

Thanks for releasing this! I have been waiting for samba since I first jailbroke my phone. So far I haven’t had any problems with it, its fast and easier than dealing with sftp. I am curious if there is a difference between Insomnia and KeepAwake for SBSettings (I thought they did the same thing but samba doesn’t appear to be affected by KeepAwake). Again, thanks openhebrew for an awesome release. I can’t wait to see a final version in Cydia one of these days.

Wow! Love it!. I was looking for this for a long time. No problems so far. Keep up the good work!.
Just wondering: any chance of mounting an external smb share?. I would LOVE to access some of my smb shares on my NAS. Can’t find smbmount to do it though.

Works perfectly
iPhone 3g OS3
win vista ultimate x64 & xp 64 32
mounting shares would be excellent or any other way other that inside terminal thank you so much for this! It is my prefered way to access my phones file system.

you really did a great job!!! Works very fine as a network drive in Win XP.(3G OS 3.0).
It took me quite a while with google to find this page. Most bloggs tell something about the package
tom.zickel.org/com.db.samba_0.0.3_iphoneos-arm.deb and I just couldn´t find that.
so thanks a lot.

Hey, just installed it on a 3G on 3.0, no issues.
But, I was copying a rather large file this aft on it via wifi, and the phone locked itself while it was copying.
I unlocked it and it took about 2 minutes for the phone to “come back to life” – everything was slow as hell during the time.

Would it be possible to prevent the auto unlock when a copy operation takes place? it would be quite nice :)

I know about insomnia, I’m just saying that regardless of the status of the wifi or the auto-lock delay in the settings, when a lenghty operation is going on it would be nice to prevent the iphone to auto-lock – until the transfer is over.

Thank you many times over. The app works well on my iPhone 2G running OS 3.0. I’m connecting using Win7 RTM.

I’m using it strictly to allow a drive mapping to the Media partition so I can access the files there using my desktop media player. It’s perfect for that.

I didn’t have any trouble getting it setup other than having to get the APT 0.7 Strict package and Mobile Terminal from Cydia in order to use apt-get.

I also agree with some of the previous feedback:
1) Add an actual icon to the settings page
2) would like to see something in the status bar indicating that samba is active (like insomnia does)

I also had some confusion about when samba was actually turned on that would be resolved by the icon. For example it appears that I have to set the autostart switch to on AND then leave the settings page by hitting the back button before it activates. It seems like flipping the switch isn’t the actual trigger to start the service.

Works like a charm. I have however two questions.
1. Why do I see two active daemons of samba (smbd)?
2. Please unveil the way how to stop/kill those instances.
Via the normal way you described I am unable to stop samba which renders my iPhone virtually an eternal samba-advertiser.

Yep, desperately waiting for the client to !
vlc4iphone can play any kind of video and I have tons on my home server. That would be nice to mount this server’s share and enjoy all of my movies on my iPod Touch !

so far working pretty good. this is definately alot easier than trying to use iphone browser or iphone explorer. Another nice thing if anyone can figure it out is a way to make the usb port toggle between normal usb or mass storage device so that we can access the filesystem from any computer when wifi is not an option.

Thank you very much for this product. Works properly under iOS 4.1 on iPhone 3GS / WinXP Pro SP3. But without sbsettings toggle, when i try install it manually, it gives dependency error. If install through cydia, no errors indicates, and toggle switch simply doesn’t appear.

1. You should enable nmbd unless it’s bad for some reason. I started it and it works great. Maybe just the option to enable it?
2. The root pw idea is great for security
3. Samba misreports free storage. It thought /private/var was low on space, when in fact it was fine. The free space warning actually applied to the root fs. Dunno why that is happening.
4. For some reason gnome can’t browse shares, but can connect to them if specified. Windows can browse them no problem.
5. It would be nice to see a share manager in the interface as long as editing smbd.conf manually doesn’t get broken :).
6. I know it’s not part of the project but I’d love to see a smb filesystem.
7. I’m seeing 1MByte/sec, which is excellent.

Great job, this is very useful. Sort of something apple could have included as a default way to manage files on your phone instead of the **** iTunes interface.

hello
I tried it with iPhone4 (4.1)…it works great…………no problem…..a few suggestion though

1. Share manager should be there in settings.
2. samba client should be showing graphically the shared resources from other systems.
3. cydia installer for samba package.
4. I am able to connect to my iphone from windows through ip address but can’t see my iphone in windows network neighbourhood, some thing to do with netbios I guess.
5. SWAT(samba administration tool) kind of environment would be nice if possible.

I hope the author doesn’t mind, since I wipe my devices frequently and need an easier way to install stuff I have put these on my experimental repository. If you want to add it to Cydia it is www (dot) pepper (dot) net.